Weâ€™ve been busy working on technical documentation to share with you on best practices for Custom Content and Mods and details about how the game works. Weâ€™re happy to announce that this can now be found here: TS4_Custom_Content_Guide.zip

The Sims 4 is a large game, so we canâ€™t document everything about it, but weâ€™ve included information about a few key things we thought youâ€™d appreciate.

We hope this accelerates your progress. Please continue to ask questions in the forums, and we will do our best to answer them.

Note that the .tdesc files in the TuningDescriptions directory are XML, i.e. human readable text files. You can also use tdesc browser.

Also note that the simsmodsquad-novelist.package included with the examples has a nonstandard compression type â€“ if you run into issues trying to re-save that package, copy + paste its contents into a new package instead.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SimGuruModSquad

The reason why the re-saved package is not working is because the compression type for the records have been modified from â€śInternal Compressionâ€ť (0xffff) to â€śzlibâ€ť 0x5a42. But the data has not been recompressed as zlib, so the game tries to decompress as zlib and fails. So this will be a bug in s4pe where it is not propagating the compression type properly.

I donâ€™t think we use that â€śInternal Compressionâ€ť compressor very much (or at all) in the shipped game packages, so that is probably why the bug has not been noticed before. The novelist package was hand created so it probably just inadvertently ended up being created with an unusual compression setting.

For an overview of other documentation published by Maxis, as well as links to the current TDESC download, see here: Maxis Info Index

I suspect part of why it is more complete in one area than another is probably the people involved. I'm guessing we got the programmer who did the python integration and probably not the designers of those file formats. I'm rather happy so far with what we got. I've been part of many modding communities and most companies are very closed when it comes to file formats and modding. I remember getting help from the NWN2 team for the binormal and tangent calculations and that was cool but we didn't get much documentation for mesh file formats.

Here we actually got an example though unfortunately it did not actually work out of the box. It can always be better and it would be great if they can help more. I think if we can make a concrete list of exact pain points we will likely have a better shot at getting that information.

To me it seems the not-working-out-of-box-ness is the same issue that they asked about on the forums recently â€“ so when theyâ€™re saying now that they'll fix this with a patch soon, that's actually very positive news in my eyes =).

I can only recommend going there and asking them specific questions â€“ the ModSquad account (not sure if itâ€™s always the same person) has been very straightforward and responsive so far. Also about things he couldnâ€™t answer himself (e.g. lot sizes); he said heâ€™d check and get back, and he did.

The documentation only provides examples of creating new xml files, not editing the combined Maxis ones (as editing them would cause the tuning mod to be incompatible with any other mod that edits the Maxis files and, apparently, create longer load times).

The combined XML tuning file mentioned in the tutorial is 0x62E94D38-0x00000000-0xF1352E740C4710BA in SimulationDeltaBuild0.package in case someone hasn't found it yet. As mentioned in the document, it shouldn't be overridden directly, but I found it useful to just copy and paste from there as basis for my changes instead of creating from scratch.

The combined XML tuning file mentioned in the tutorial is 0x62E94D38-0x00000000-0xF1352E740C4710BA in SimulationDeltaBuild0.package in case someone hasn't found it yet. As mentioned in the document, it shouldn't be overridden directly, but I found it useful to just copy and paste from there as basis for my changes instead of creating from scratch.

That's very helpful, thanks for that.

Has anyone found a good way to find the ID for various things? (Such as from the novelist example, statistic_Skill_AdultMajor_Writing has ID 16714)

EDIT: Okay, I found what I was looking for by ctrl+f'ing the aforementioned combined XML tuning file. That is a seriously huge text file!

The combined XML tuning file mentioned in the tutorial is 0x62E94D38-0x00000000-0xF1352E740C4710BA in SimulationDeltaBuild0.package in case someone hasn't found it yet. As mentioned in the document, it shouldn't be overridden directly, but I found it useful to just copy and paste from there as basis for my changes instead of creating from scratch.

Ah, thanks. I've been a bit busy with work, so I haven't had the time to go poking through the Sims 4 packages as much as I'd like.

I know it's a stupid question, but how do I edit the XML tuning files? I am right now in the Alien abduction tuning file and I see a lot of numbers. What do these numbers mean and in what way do I need to change these settings? I want to make reverse what EA did with the Aliens in the last patch. How do I do this?